


would you pray if i said you were dying

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Blood and Injury, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Major Character Injury, check back in for the fluff, insp. by dialogue from 'the mummy' (1999)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-04-30 23:25:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14507751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: In the Badlands it’s the kind of thing they’d callvworkka bait. In the Badlands, it’s something Rey would have been too careful to let happen.She’s gotten sloppy, since him. Careless.Having someone else watching your back can do that.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OccasionallyCreative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OccasionallyCreative/gifts).



> would you be a little stronger,  
> or fall down on your knees?  
> — kamelot, 'liar liar (wasteland monarchy)'

“This is where you get to say  _I told you so,_ ” Rey says, her voice coming out uncomfortably like a wheeze.

Ben throws her a scathing look from where he kneels at her side. Apparently, he isn't finding their situation quite as humorous.

(It’s not, not really, but Rey doesn’t know how else to process the fact that she’s probably dying.)

Pain radiates through her body, emanating in scarlet-tinged waves from what’s left of her midriff. She’s trying not to look at it now but a cursory glance had been enough to know  _what’s left_ isn’t a whole lot—not so much an intact body as a loose assemblage of red things (guts, those are her  _guts_  peeking through) that sort of resembles a human torso.

 _Are they still insides, if they’re trying to get out?_  The thought makes her snort. She still isn’t entirely sure what had happened, only that it had hurt a lot and made a godsfucked mess, and now there’s a hole in her stomach and too much blood spilling over where her fingers clutch as she tries vaguely to hold herself together.

“I did tell you so, though it gives me no satisfaction to be right,” Ben informs her stiffly, his hands already busy over her middle. Rey grits her teeth, the short bark of laughter dissolving into a whine as his fingers probe the wound. She doesn’t know what the hell he thinks he’s looking for—it’s fairly obvious from where she’s sitting that it’s a game-ending kind of injury.

In the Badlands it’s the kind of thing they’d call  _vworkka bait._  In the Badlands, it’s something Rey would have been too careful to let happen.

She’s gotten sloppy, since him. Careless. Having someone else watching your back can do that.

That’s not really Ben’s fault, though.

“Stop— _nhh_ — _poking_  me,” she hisses, batting at his hands—or trying to, but her own aren’t working the way they should, flopping like fish at the ends of her arms instead of responding to her brain’s insistent signals. “You’ll get blood on you.”

Ben glances up just long enough to scowl at her and ah, she hasn’t seen  _that_ look in a while. “Hilarious,” he mutters, and at first she thinks it’s because he’s already drenched in blood (only most of it theirs), but then Rey picks up on the strain in his voice and the muted panic in his eyes; the  _fear_ he’s doing a poor job of hiding, and realises that no—getting a little of her gore on him is in fact the least of his concerns.

“Ben,” she breathes. This time, her arm works fine when she lifts it to paw clumsily at his hair, doing her best to push it back out of his dear worried face. She loves his face, she thinks, though she really  _will_  die before she tells him so. “Ben, it’s okay.”

He lets out a strangled sound and ducks his head so she can’t see his face at all, and then he’s grasping her hand in one of his and lowering it gently to her side while the other pulls her lightsaber to him with the Force.

Her lightsaber, she muses dazedly. Why hers?

“I don’t have a field kit,” he tells her, quiet like he hopes she won’t hear. “I—I can’t even clean it. I’ve got to close it, for now.”

“’kay,” mumbles Rey, unfazed. Closing the wound means it won’t hurt anymore, right? It’ll make it better.

Why’s he looking at her so apprehensively, then, like he half-expects her to bite his head off for suggesting it?

“This will—this will hurt, Rey.”

“Huh?” She blinks up at him. Ben lifts the saber, tilting one end pointedly towards her stomach.

 _Oh_.

“Oh.” Rey gnaws at her lip, tastes iron there and lets it go. Things have begun to go a little fuzzy around the edges, shadows gathering in the corners of her vision and robbing Ben’s features of their clarity. She squints, focusing until all she can see is him: his eyes, wide and terrified; his ears, sticking out endearingly from the mess of his hair; the lush fullness of his mouth—Force, his  _mouth,_  there should be  _laws_  against having a mouth like that—

“Rey,” Ben breathes, mistaking the sudden glazed look on her face for something else entirely. She can feel him, all of him, the staticky mess of fear and panic filling his head and thrusting through it his stubborn determination to do whatever— _whatever_ it takes to save her.

Later, she’ll blame what she does next on blood loss and the honest belief that she was doomed, but in the moment Rey’s barely even conscious of moving as she lurches up to plant a haphazard kiss on Ben's lips.

She misses, because of course she does, her trajectory a few inches out from where she’s aiming, but apparently the universe hasn’t forsaken her completely yet because he flinches back at the sudden movement and inadvertently brings his sweet, red mouth into perfect alignment with hers.

And  _oh,_ how sweet it is.

Ben makes a startled noise in the back of his throat but he’s kissing her back already, taking what she gives and offering it back a hundredfold and it’s so  _much,_ the yield of his mouth under hers, the heat of him, the way he  _tastes_ —it would drive her to distraction if she weren’t already there, and now his ridiculous giant hands are coming up to support her shoulders and his splayed fingers span the full width of her back as he  _cradles_  her with such infinite tenderness she wants to crythat it can’t last forever.

His want for her laps at the bond, heady waves of disbelief and desire breaking over her with the warmth of summer. Rey floats on that sunlit current, torn utterly free from her moorings by the reality of how much Ben wants her.

How much he has wanted  _this,_  to kiss her and know she wanted it too, but—not like this.

Never like this.

 _Would you even have done this, if I wasn’t dying?_  She thinks. Then— _would I?_

Doesn’t much matter, now.

His big hands cup her neck as she falls back again, guiding her down till her shoulders hit the wall once more. Faint with pain, her vision darkening, Rey grins blearily up at him.

“Okay,” she says.


	2. Chapter 2

The girl blinks. This isn’t what she’d been expecting from death.

She was dead once, or close to it. She knows the way it feels, the dull, tight cramp of hunger, the way thirst and fatigue make the stars smear across the dark and the horizon turn to liquid and every step feel like a mountain as tall as the sky. She knows the fierce white heat of it, the hot drum of heart’s blood onto the sand, and this slow shivery thing is not the death she walked beside for every day of her youth. Death isn’t cold and dark, quiet and muffled and sterile. Death isn’t this _void_ in which she floats. Death is the sharp pain that comes with struggling for breath after a fall, the stink of flesh gone rotten in the sun. Death is bone-white and red, blood and teeth and decay. Death reeks. Death _burns_.

The girl has heard it called a journey by the holy folk, but she’s never seen a dead person walk. You see their bodies, sometimes, lying where they fell. Mostly they just rot there until the sands claim them or the scavenger beasts come for their supper.

They aren't on a journey, they've just...stopped. That's all death is. When life just  _stops._

In the north there are villages who use the bones of the dead to make windchimes. The girl has always thought that a little wasteful.

The girl. She has a name: her name is Rey and she has never needed another. There was a woman who had that name before her, but this woman is dead now. Possibly, she has been dead all along. Before her there came a god who had the name perhaps first of all things. She was always so angry, the god. She made the sands whip up in her furies, made them storm across the desert to darken the face of the sun and swallow star destroyers whole, she could change the shape of the land with her wrath and it would never be enough to mollify her.

Rey understood it—the rage, the blind _fury_ that made you want to tear at the sky with your bare hands and scream until your voice gave out. She understood it, even if it was an urge she wasn’t free to give in to. Rage made you sloppy and reckless; rage was a waste of energy, a loss of control that would get you killed.

Later, Rey will hear _anger is the path to the Dark Side_ and she will wonder if it means the same thing, but as a girl on Jakku she only listens to the wail of the sandstorms overhead and pretends it’s on her behalf that R’iia screams.

She grows up on the edge of death’s kingdom, spends years wandering in its shadow, and there are moments in the vast unbroken desert of her childhood where she comes so close to it— _so_ close, moments where she can do nothing but drag her tired bones over the earth and, like daughters do with their mothers the universe over, rest her head in death’s own lap, and as the first breaths of sand begin to cover her she thinks that if she can only sleep she'll be safe. If she can only rest, everything will be better, because death isn’t something to be afraid of: it’s just not life.

But maybe the desert is a better mother than her own because it never lets her do it: never accepts her surrender. Even at the outer limits of her endurance when every fibre of her pleads to be allowed to stop and just _rest,_ it tugs her on, pushing her up and to her feet and crooning in a voice like the wind _hold on, sweetheart. Don’t give in._

_Wake up._

There’s a new voice in her head, now, a new presence calling her home.

_Rey, wake up._

_Ben?_

* * *

 

It’s night, maybe. She can’t see the sky but it’s only ever this quiet after dark, before the shift change and after everyone else has turned in. She likes the stillness: it reminds her of home.

The desert is still that, even after so long. Perhaps it always will be.

Home is not what you choose to carry with you, after all. Home is what you cannot leave behind.

One limb at a time, one digit at a time, Rey runs through a cursory scan of her systems.

Legs, two: check.

Toes, ten: check.

(She gives them all a wiggle, just to be sure.)

Arms, two: check.

Fingers, ten: check.

Head, one: attached.

Torso, one (just): _ow._

Conclusions: not dead, then?

_Off to a good start._

For a few minutes she simply concentrates on breathing, on the mechanical push and pull of air into her lungs, because it’s uncomplicated enough and means she isn’t thinking about the _other_ thing—the memory, which is growing clearer with each passing moment.

When she can’t ignore it any longer, Rey decides that maybe death wouldn’t have been the worst outcome after all.

She can only lie there, mortified, as the recollection of what she’d done just before she passed out assails her.

And _who_ she’d done it to.

She’d _kissed_ him. _Ben._ Lunged at him like a ripper-raptor chasing down a hot meal and _kissed him_.

Gods. What was she thinking?

She wasn’t, plainly. Everything had been a haze in those last few moments. She’d been _dying_. Maybe she hadn’t even really done it: maybe she’d only imagined it, delirious with pain and blood loss as she was. It was a pretty enough picture, to paint there at the end, surely no one would judge her for letting her daydreams run away with her—

She remembers the taste of him, the hesitant way his tongue had flicked over her lips like he was seeking something, like a promise that if things hadn’t been so utterly _fucked_ he’d be pushing his luck even further. She remembers the warm, solid breadth of him surrounding her as she’d tugged him close and done her level best to devour him whole, and…yeah. No.

She hadn’t imagined that.

Groaning, Rey brings her hands up to cover her face and shut out the world (and all its embarrassing realities) a little while longer.

“Rey?”

The world would seem to have other plans.

Of course he’s here. He’d never left.

She can feel him, the quiet presence on the periphery of her awareness, that hidden place where his mind and hers are bound with threads of gold. There’s peace in being so close to him, a serenity that’s more an absence of the tension she’s been carrying for so long; she has worn their distance in her bones over the years, until it’s become an indelible part of her musculature, a cord pulled taut across star systems. Now, with him by her side, she feels only ease.

In this moment, the Force itself is content.

He brushes up against the connection and the threads shimmer, a trembling warmth creeping from Rey’s heart down to her fingertips to feel him so near.

He was so, so afraid. She can feel that, too. He was _terrified_ that he’d lose her, that she was going where he couldn’t follow and he’d be left alone again.

He would burn worlds to keep either of them from that fate.

He would burn _himself_ to dust before he let her die.

Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to face him.

_You’re a colossal fucking coward, Rey of Jakku._

“Rey…?”

Oh, but he sounds so _sad_.

She opens one eye slowly, peering between her fingers at the man slumped over beside her.

He looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks.

“You look terrible,” she croaks, and Ben’s head drops onto the bed as all the tension bleeds out of him.

 _“Rey,”_ he blurts, pressing his forehead into the covers over her thigh.

Shaken, Rey reaches out a hand to thread her fingers through his hair, lets her nails scrape lightly over his scalp in a way that makes Ben groan and reluctantly lift his head again. His dark eyes burn into hers and her breath catches at the intensity there.

“Don’t _do_ that again,” he whispers, eyes stark.

Rey grimaces. It’s not like she’d done it on purpose. “No promises,” she says with a wry smile, but once again she’s the only one laughing.

“Please,” he breathes, “Rey.”

After a moment, she nods.

“No,” she agrees softly. Ben manages to sag even further into the side of the bed, nearly limp with exhaustion and relief.

His eyes haven’t lost their hesitant look, though. He’s holding onto something, biting his lip as he considers, and with a sinking feeling Rey realises why.

“Why—” he begins, and she steels herself for the worst. Swallowing, Ben valiantly soldiers on. “You—you kissed me.”

Rey contemplates the void.

_Did I?_

Maybe if she doesn’t answer, he’ll just…drop it.

_And the Badlands will run blue once more._

Ben Organa-Solo comes from stubborn stock. He’s as pig-headed as she is, and he can sense what lies beneath her nerves.

“I just—” he tries again. “Why?”

Rey keeps on staring straight ahead of her, baffled that such a clever man can so utterly fail to connect the dots. “I dunno,” she says blithely, “I thought I was dying, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

She risks a glance at him then.

Ben looks a little devastated, and it had been a joke—mostly—but the sight of his lower lip _quivering_ hits her like a blow.

She reaches for him instinctively, grabs his nearest hand and guides it to her lap where she grips it tight. He stares at their joined hands dumbly, fingers twitching against her palms. “I’m not, though,” she assures him. “Dead, that is. Or dying, as far as I know.”

Ben looks up at her again, his eyes darting between hers. Relief, raw and aching, pours off him: he knows she is alive. He knows she isn’t dying and he knows she will not die, because he healed her himself, though he won’t tell her that until she coaxes it out of him later.

But—he’s afraid, still. He’s always been afraid.

For all the closeness of their minds has Rey feeling like she would topple into him if she leaned an inch too far, it’s on Ben’s face that she reads the anxiety and it makes her heart twist.

She wants to _be_ read, now. Wants to be seen, in all her wretched, wanting glory, and let him know he has no reason to fear.

Squeezing his hand in hers, Rey lets herself be seen.

“Can I do it again?”


End file.
